The shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, says teachers should be licensed like lawyers and doctors, with regular checks on their performance in the classroom.
Mr Hunt told the BBC: “Just like lawyers and doctors they should have the same professional standing which means re-licensing themselves, which means continued professional development, which means being the best possible they can be.
“If you’re not a motivated teacher – passionate about your subject, passionate about being in the classroom – then you shouldn’t really be in this profession.”
He told The Times: “If we want to re-professionalise the teachers it would be crazy not to do it. If teachers are not re-licensed they will not be allowed to teach.”
Labour dropped a similar plan, dubbed “classroom MOTs” before the 2010 general election in the face of union opposition.
But the new proposal received a cautious welcome from the NASUWT, Britain’s biggest teaching union, who said the move could be “a basis on which progress could be made” if it heralded the return of qualified teacher status (QTS).
The coalition scrapped the requirement for academies to employ teachers with QTS in 2012.
Chris Keates, general secretary of the NASUWT, said: “If the proposal for Licence to Practise signals a commitment by a future Labour government to restore qualified teacher status as a requirement for all teachers in state funded schools, to introduce, within a national framework of pay and conditions of service, a contractual entitlement for all teachers to continuing professional development and to re-establish a proper system of professional regulation which ensures that all headteachers have QTS and NPQH and are accredited to lead and manage schools, then this is a basis on which progress could be made.
“As in medicine, a licence to practise in teaching should apply to headteachers and not just teachers, as it does to consultants as well as junior doctors. It should apply to state and independent schools.
“It is deeply debilitating and demoralising for teachers that any attempt to have a public debate about developing the teaching profession and the quality of teaching inevitably is hijacked by commentators and presented as a system to ‘root out incompetent teachers’ and present our public education system as failing.
“No group of workers, least of all teachers, deserves to be treated in this way. No wonder resignations from the profession are high and recruitment to teacher training is falling.”
Labour has already said it would insist on all teachers having Qualified Teacher Status, with staff already working in academies given a deadline to acquire a formal qualification.
A Conservative Party spokesman said it was willing to look any proposals which will “genuinely improve the quality of teaching”.
He added: “We have already taken action by allowing heads to remove teachers from the classroom in a term, as opposed to a year previously, and scrapping the three-hour limit on classroom observations.
“We are improving teacher training, expanding Teach First and allowing heads to pay good teachers more. Thanks to our reforms, a record proportion of top graduates are entering the profession.
“Fixing the schools system so young people have the skills they need is a key part of our long-term economic plan.”
Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), said: “The fact is that teachers are very highly observed. Many of our members describe themselves as being surveilled the whole time.”
She added: “There will be a good many teachers who will just see this as another hurdle.”